Lucia Cerchie gives us some advice:
Ever dealt with a misbehaving consumer group? Imbalanced broker load? This could be due to your consumer group and partitioning strategy!
Once, on a dark and stormy night, I set myself up for this error. I was creating an application to demonstrate how you can use Apache Kafka® to decouple microservices. The function of my “microservices” was to create latte objects for a restaurant ordering service. It was set up a little like this:
I wanted to implement this in Kafka by using consumers, each reading from a common coffee topic, but with their own partition. Now this was a naive approach. Why?
Click through to learn the reason, as well as some of the mechanics of how consumer groups work.